Digital Photography Now Printer Reviews

3-part series: Photo ink-jets laid bare

Updated 19th February - 2002
By Ian Burley

Part 1: The truth about photo ink-jet running costs

Epson Stylus 895 Photo

Epson ink cartridges for the 895 have a chip built in that logs its duty cycle

Like HP, Epson uses one black ink tank and one colour tank for the Stylus 895 Photo. However, Epson’s colour tank incorporates 5 colours (cyan, magenta and yellow, plus light photo cyan and light photo magenta). There is also no built in print head. The tank is inserted into the print head assembly. The print head is meant to last the lifetime of the printer.

At just £13, Epson’s colour cartridge is very affordable. Oddly enough, the physically smaller black cartridge is more expensive at £17. Together they amount to £30.

Epson’s Premium Glossy Photo paper is available in cut sheets and 10cm wide rolls. 20 sheets of A4 costs £11; 55p per sheet.

The Epson’s cartridges use a small built in chip to log how much ink has been channelled through the print head. This method is not exact and serves only as a rough guide. The test run elicited a colour cartridge warning at 25 pages and the driver stopped printing after the 29^th print had been completed. All pages were printed without blemishes. Each page took 255 seconds to complete.

The ink cost per page amounted to 59.4p per page (14.6p black and 44.8p colour). Overall cost per A4 page was 114.4p

Although you can print without borders using the roll paper option, it’s marginally more expensive than printing four 10cm prints from an A4 sheet and trimming them afterwards.

Test results - printer by printer:

• HP psc-950
• Canon S800
• Epson Stylus Photo 895
• Lexmark Z43
   
• Running cost conclusions

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